Blueprint of Backlash: How European Homonationalism Shaped Turkey’s Anti-LGBT Politics

Across the globe, gender and sexuality have become central sites of political struggle, with states deploying anti-LGBT discourse as a tool of nationalistic and authoritarian consolidation. This article examines how anti-LGBT backlash in Turkey was co-produced through the circulation of transnational sexual rights discourses and domestic political strategy. Through historical discourse analysis, I trace Turkey’s shift between 2002 and 2022 from strategic inaction to active repression of LGBT life and activism. I show how European homonationalist human rights frameworks—particularly those that rendered same-sex marriage a symbol of modernity—initially enabled symbolic tolerance, but were later reworked by political elites to recode queerness as a Western intrusion threatening national sovereignty and morality. Rather than simply rejecting LGBT rights, political actors selectively appropriated the language of rights to legitimize repression. By theorizing backlash as a transnationally mediated discursive process, this study demonstrates how liberal rights discourse can simultaneously encourage inclusion and provide the scripts and logics for exclusion. In doing so, I challenge accounts of backlash as reactive or culturally idiosyncratic and reveal how gender and sexuality become instruments of authoritarian governance precisely because of, not despite, their entanglement with liberal rights.